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October 25, 2014

Fighting Info Overload: Creating to Create

The online world is a wonderful place – full of tips, tricks, articles, advice, video how-tos, guides, and ebooks. It’s also an impressively distracting rabbit hole of wonder. All I have to do is open my Feedly or Gmail inbox, and poof! There goes 3 hours of my weekend.

It’s so easy to get caught up in consuming rather than creating when working primarily from your laptop. Today, I was starting off down that slippery slope, juggling brainstorming an opt-in offer for my new website, listening to a branding video, and reading the latest edition of “inspired COACH,” when I came across an article, “How to Draw a Mandala.” Rather than bookmark it as something to come back to, I decided to hit pause on reading, pull out my markers, and actually create something!

It only took 20 minutes to finish my drawing, and though it’s no masterpiece, it reminded me how good it feels to create from within and also to finish something. As a knitter, I found the repetitive patterns in the mandela meditative and centering. As a soon to be business owner, I found the entire activity grounding and inspiring.

If you’re struggling with information overload, my advice is to take a deep breath and create. No matter how small – a doodle on a scrap of paper, a few rows on your knitting project, or an overdue entry in your journal – it will kick start your motivation. Promise!